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Columbia University Press Blog | Author Interview / Black History Month / Black Studies / Literary Studies / Music | By Justin Liang | June 17, 2022
Excerpt: From the collages of Romare Bearden and the paintings of Jean-Michel Basquiat, to the fiction of Ralph Ellison and Toni Morrison, to the music of Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, in Antagonistic Cooperation: Jazz, Collage, Fiction, and the Shaping of African American Culture Robert G. O’Meally explores how the worlds of African American jazz, art, and literature have informed one another. In celebration of Juneteenth, Justin Liang and Professor O’Meally discuss the theory of antagonistic cooperation. |
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Harvard Magazine | Features | By Robert G. O’Meally | January-February 2020
Excerpt: On November 28, 1977, Calvin Tomkins’s biographical word-sketch of artist Romare Bearden appeared in The New Yorker. Prompted perhaps by his gallery, Bearden then decided to cast his own life as a sequence of collages. A 1979 exhibit displayed 28 works, accompanied by titles and short captions coauthored by the artist and his friend Albert Murray, the novelist. A 19-collage sequel followed in 1981. Bearden inscribed the captions on the gallery walls in looping letters echoing his signature. |
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Jazz Times – America’s Jazz Magazine | By Mark Tucker | April 25, 2019
Jazz,” writes editor Robert O’Meally in the preface to this hefty anthology of essays, interviews, and reportage, “is a massive, irresistibly influential, politically charged part of our culture.” It represents not only “the definitive sound of America in our time” but a constant in daily life: a “subtle set of threads [that] seems to sparkle within virtually every aspect of modern American living.” |
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Library of Congress blog | By Wendi Maloney | July 3, 2018
Excerpt: Robert O’Meally spent two weeks in residence at the Library of Congress earlier this year researching all things jazz. He is the Zora Neale Hurston Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and an authority on Ralph Ellison and African-American literature. He is also an internationally recognized scholar of jazz and founder of Columbia’s Center for Jazz Studies. He is known in particular for reaching across disciplines to interpret the place of jazz in American culture. |
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Museum of Modern Art | Interactive Online Exhibit / Video | 2015
Zora Neale Hurston Professor of English and Comparative Literature and founder and former director of the Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia University. |
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Columbia Magazine | Arts & Humanities | By Rebecca Shapiro | Winter 2014-15
Excerpt: Greek poet. One African-American artist. One intrepid professor. How Robert O’Meally brought Romare Bearden back to Harlem. |
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Columbia College Today | Cover Story | By Jamie Katz | May / June 2009
Excerpt: Robert G. O’Meally approached the altar of academe as a literary scholar, but music was his mistress all along. Out of this duality, he founded Columbia’s internationally renowned Center for Jazz Studies, now in its 10th year. |
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Emory University | Camille Billops and James V. Hatch archives | By Farah Jasmine Griffin | October 5, 2008
Excerpt: When I think of Bob O’Meally, I think of someone who is elegant and eloquent, who is an extraordinary writer and scholar. It’s hard to think of you as someone who only does literary studies because you do so much more. You write about literature, you write literature, you write about the visual arts and about music, not as separate entities, but as a kind of holistic project of the arts. I hope that through this conversation we can get a sense of how you began to think of them as interconnected. |
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Jerry Jazz Musician | By Robert O’Meally | August 20, 2002
Excerpt: “I teach a class (at Columbia University) on jazz in American culture”, editor Robert O’Meally told us. “For years now I have put together a handout for my students that consists of Ellison’s writings on music. About five years ago, it struck me that that stack of Xerox’s was the best book on jazz I knew.” So, O’Meally went to Modern Books and set about compiling Ellison’s essays on jazz music that now exist between the covers of Living with Music, a practical introduction to the musical intelligence of one of America’s greatest literary minds. |
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The New York Times | Public Lives | By Joyce Wadler | February 23, 1999
Excerpt: ROBERT G. O’MEALLY, the Columbia University professor and jazz writer who will be attending his first Grammy Awards ceremony tomorrow night (he’s been nominated), in his first tuxedo (hey, he’s not going to lie to you, he’s excited), is one of those guys who likes to put together music tapes, at least one a week. |
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The New York Times | Revisions | By Margo Jefferson | May 18, 1998
Excerpt: In the meantime, gather ye pleasures while ye may. This is a five-CD collection, which comes with an excellent introduction (a combination of history, analysis and appreciation) by Robert G. O’Meally, the Zora Neale Hurston Professor of Literature at Columbia University. |
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Barnard Bulletin | by Erika Woodside | February 3, 1992
Excerpt: Holiday maintained an amazing balance in that she had a belief and understanding of love and life in a world that challenged her power through racism, drugs and poverty.
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